This course is designed to introduce students to the “major poetry
and prose” of a period in English literary history lasting from
roughly 1830-1900. As you may know, this period—the “Victorian Era”—
has largely been remembered for its fictions—long,
sprawling, “triple-decker” novels—and celebrated most for its
beloved novelists: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy (to
name a few). Because this class focuses on what are now commonly
treated as the “minor literatures” of Victoria’s reign—the genres of
poetry, essay, and drama—we’re going to take that “minorness” as our
starting point and our central concern, asking not why literary
history represents such texts as minor, but how and why the
Victorians frequently chose to thematize themselves, their
world, their art, or their understanding through the deployment of
various forms of “minorness.” We’ll be looking closely at a number
of such forms: the sketch, the fragment, the miniature, the
likeness, the tale, the lyric, and the photograph. We’ll also be
interested in representations of minorness as they appear in
otherwise massive constructions, like the Crystal Palace—900,000
square feet of glass built to house such articles as perfume bottles
and inkstands—or the seemingly endless elegiac poem (Tennyson’s In
Memoriam). Key figures will include: Carlyle, the Brownings,
Tennyson, Darwin, Dickens, Brontë, Gaskell, Ruskin, the Rossettis,
Pater, and Wilde. We’ll read one novel (of scale), Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, and at least one play (Peter
Pan).

Course texts: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: the
Victorian Era (Vol. 5); Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(Penguin Classics); Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t
Grow Up (edition TBA); and various materials on E-
Reserves.